Hillary Clinton has made Donald Trump’s remarks about a federal judge, among others, the basis for a campaign accusing him of being a racist. It is worth visiting Clinton’s own history of making racially offensive comments for political gain.

1. “Hard-working white Americans” prefer her to Obama. In May 2008, Clinton told the USA Today that while Obama was leading the delegate race, she still had a broader political base. Unfortunately, she made that claim in explicitly racial terms, citing an Associated Press poll “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

2. “Colored People’s Time.” Clinton appeared alongside left-wing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio at the annual Inner Circle Dinner this year, and joined in a racist joke based on a stereotype that black people are late for everything:

Clinton: I just have to say thanks for the endorsement, Bill. Took you long enough. [Laughter]

De Blasio: Sorry Hillary, I was running on C.P. time. [Audience gasps]

Host: I don’t like jokes like that.

As Mediate later noted, the cable news networks mostly ignored the racist joke

3. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t really THAT great. As she struggled to stop the Obama insurgency in the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton tried to diminish Obama’s credentials as a “community organizer,” which had led some to draw connections between him and Dr. King. Clinton argued that it was really a professional politician, President Lyndon Johnson, who made the difference: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act”

4. “Ah don’t feel no ways TAHHHHHRD.” Clinton, like Vice President Al Gore, and indeed like President Obama himself, has a tendency to imitate what she believes to be an African-American accent when she speaks before black audiences. Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, at least has some cultural competence and experience, honed through practice in inner city Chicago. Clinton manages to sound condescending every time — most notoriously in this cringe-worthy clip from 2008.

5. Obama’s “slumlord,” and “super predators.” Losing traction in 2008, Clinton belatedly attacked Obama’s connection to fraudster and fundraiser Tony Rezko: “I was fighting against those [Reagan] ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago,” she said in a South Carolina debate. The remark was described as racist by Obama fans — as was her 1996 term for chronic criminals, “super predators.”

The following items are from Brian Anderson at downtrend.com:

The liberal media, democrats, and even some Republicans are going crazy over Donald Trump’s “racism.” For the record, the GOP nominee has made comments against illegal alien criminals and Islamic terrorists, but has never attacked or spoken ill of anyone’s race. Hillary Clinton on the other hand has a long and sordid history of making racist remarks, but somehow gets a free pass.

If the media wants to focus on the racism of the presidential candidates, why are they ignoring these prime examples:

#6 – In 1974, after Bill Clinton lost his bid for a Senate seat, Hillary lashed out at campaign manager Paul Fray calling him a, “f*cking Jew bastard!” This outburst was witnessed and confirmed by 3 people, so it definitely happened.

#7 – As First Lady, Hillary called young black men “super-predators” indicating that she thought all young black males were violent criminals. She also said, “We have to bring them to heel,” like young blacks are the same as dogs. Despite thinking this was incredibly racist, blacks still support Hillary.

#8 – While serving in the US Senate, Hillary tried to make a joke that disparaged a civil rights icon and demeaned all people from India. “I love this quote. It’s from Mahatma Gandhi. He ran a gas station down in St. Louis for a couple of years. Mr. Gandhi, do you still go to the gas station?” asked Clinton.

#9 – In 2005 Hillary said, “I am adamantly against illegal immigrants.” She also, as a Senator, voted to construct a wall between the US and Mexico. Considering the main “proof” of Trump’s racism is that he opposes illegal immigration and wants to build a wall, isn’t it odd that Hillary gets off for having said the same thing?

#10 – During the 2008 democratic primaries Hillary Clinton’s campaign started the “birther” rumors, questioning Obama’s US citizenship. They even circulated the now famous picture of Obama in full Muslim garb. Somehow Trump’s campaign to get Obama to release his birth certificate is racist, but Hillary’s role in starting the birther movement is not.

#11 – Also during the 2008 presidential race, Hillary’s husband Bill said this of Obama: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Hillary didn’t say this one but her husband did and she certainly never disavowed it.#12 – Shortly after announcing her candidacy, Hillary said “all lives matter” in a black church. I don’t think this one is racist, but lefties, black activists, and Hillary herself all do, so it makes the list. Plus as is the case with most of this stuff, if Trump had said it liberals would freak the hell out.

#13 – In November of 2015, Hillary called people in this country illegally “illegal aliens”. Trump is a racist when he says “illegal aliens,” why isn’t Hillary?

#14 – April was a great month for Hillary’s racism, as she also made a comment disparaging Native Americans. She said she had experience dealing with wild men when they “get off the reservation.” In essence she said Native Americans are savages who must be segregated from the rest of society.

#15 – On a black radio show, Hillary pandered to black voters by claiming she always carries hot sauce in her purse. It was racist when Donald Trump pandered Hispanics by eating a taco bowl, but not racist when Hillary pandered blacks. How does that work?

To recap: Trump has said that some illegal aliens are criminals, suggested a judge with ties to a radical racist Mexican group may be biased, and offered the opinion that we do more to keep radical Islamic Terrorists from getting into the country. These things that have nothing to do with race are why the media constantly tells us Trump is a racist.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has decades of making anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-Indian (both Native Americans and Asians), and anti-Latino statements. Why is Trump a racist and Hillary is not?

While Bernie Sanders has now been protested twice, there seems to be a willingness to overlook Hillary Clinton’s past on the topics of race and gay rights. Black Lives Matter is a noble organization that has brought much needed attention to profound issues; however, recent protests ignore the fact that Clinton’s political career runs contrary to many of the organization’s stated objectives. Aside from the fact Hillary Clinton recently stated “All Lives Matter” in a speech to a historically black church in Missouri, below are five legitimate reasons why Black Lives Matter should also protest Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, in contrast, ran a now infamous 3 a.m. ad with a reportedly “racist sub-message” against Obama in 2008. According to Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson’s New York Times op-ed titled “The Red Phone in Black and White,” Hillary Clinton resorted to exploiting racial fears during 2008’s heated competition for the White House:

ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right...

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery...

I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic...

The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism...

It is striking, too, that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast, Mrs. Clinton refused to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a Christian and has never been a Muslim.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, author of numerous books on race and the history of racism, is also the author of the landmark Slavery and Social Death. His observations of Clinton’s 3 a.m. ad come from decades of profound analysis on the issue of race and politics. Bernie Sanders has never engaged in the utilization of racial fears, prejudice and stereotype.

Not only did Twitter grill Clinton’s Ferguson remarks (when she eventually made a statement), but leaders within the African-American community questioned her motives in waiting until after the protests to speak.

Like Keystone XL and other topics, Hillary Clinton refused to issue a definitive statement during an ongoing controversy. According to a CNN article titled “Hillary Clinton breaks silence on Ferguson,” the former Secretary of State had a specific reason for waiting so long to take a firm stance:

(CNN) - Hillary Clinton broke her silence Thursday...

In the weeks after the shooting, civil rights and black thought leaders had called on Clinton to comment on Ferguson.

Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN commentator, said Clinton’s decision to “ignore the question and to not proactively and assertively address the issue is shameful.”

“Hillary Clinton offers a statement on Michael Brown and Ferguson. 19 days later,” Hill tweeted in response to the speech. “Next she’ll offer her thoughts on Rodney King and Vietnam.”

Therefore, isn’t Clinton’s politically motivated refusal to speak about Ferguson before an almost three week period worthy of protest? If such actions are deemed “shameful,” then doesn’t this refusal to address Ferguson, when Ferguson was in flames, worthy of focus from Black Lives Matter?

18. Bill Clinton recently apologized for his 1994 crime bill and his role in the mass incarceration that has disproportionately affected African-Americans.

One of the biggest issues today, pertaining to race and politics, is the tragedy of mass incarceration. In a Vox article titled “Bill Clinton apologized for his 1994 crime bill, but he still doesn’t get why it was bad,” the issue of mass incarceration was exacerbated under the Clinton presidency:

Hillary Clinton is campaigning on, among other things, an end to the era of mass incarceration. Awkwardly, Bill Clinton, former president of the United States, signed a law in 1994 that did a lot to accelerate mass incarceration...

The Clintons are politicians, and it makes sense that they’ve shifted their positions in response to the demands of the public and their party. In the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats were afraid of being seen as “soft on crime,” and felt that cracking down on crime might help African-American communities...

While the Clinton presidency “did a lot to accelerate mass incarceration” and didn’t want to be “soft on crime,” Bernie Sanders has clearly stated, “Millions of lives have been destroyed because people are in jail for nonviolent crimes.”

19. Black Lives Matter is also heavily focused on gay rights. Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage up until 2013.

Clinton also stated in 2004 that traditional marriage was “the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the midst of history as one of the foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization.”

An article in The Atlantic titled “Hillary Clinton’s Gay-Marriage Problem” highlights the fact that Clinton was against what most gay rights activists have worked for years to finally accomplish:

Hillary Clinton didn’t refrain from supporting same-sex marriage for political reasons — before last year, she earnestly believed that marriage equality should be denied to gays and lesbians.

That same year, Clinton ran for president while openly opposing gay marriage. If she is to be believed, she also opposed gay marriage as recently as 2013, long after a majority of Americans already held a more gay-friendly position.

While Hillary Clinton believed up until recently that marriage should be “denied to gays and lesbians,” Bernie Sanders has a long history supporting gay rights. It should be noted by Black Lives Matter and all gay rights activists that Bernie Sanders voted against Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

20. Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008 not only ran an ad accused of having a “racist sub-message,” but a black leader in the House of Representatives denounced Bill Clinton’s attacks on Obama.

According a New York Times article in 2008 titled “Black Leader in House Denounces Bill Clinton’s Remarks,” black leaders in Congress condemned Bill Clinton’s remarks about Barrack Obama:

The third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives and one of the country’s most influential African-American leaders sharply criticized former President Bill Clinton this afternoon for what he called Mr. Clinton’s “bizarre” conduct during the Democratic primary campaign.

Representative James E. Clyburn, an undeclared superdelegate from South Carolina who is the Democratic whip in the House, said that “black people are incensed over all of this,” referring to statements that Mr. Clinton had made in the course of the heated race between his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost “unanimous” view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were “committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.”

After the uproar over several comments, Bill Clinton was even forced to say, “I am not a racist”.

The goal of protesting a political event is noble, especially when such grandiose issues are at stake. However, when one politician has a record of promoting civil rights and gay rights when opinion polls were against both, and Bill Clinton executed a mentally disabled black man simply for the goal of winning an election, the Clinton campaign should also receive protests.

Hillary Clinton’s past runs contrary to the stated goals of Black Lives Matter. Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage, used a campaign ad accused of having racist undertones, waited a calculating 19 days to address Ferguson, and utilized racial prejudices against Barack Obama.

Furthermore, Bill Clinton’s crime bill may have helped contribute to Ferguson, Baltimore and other tragedies linked to mass incarceration. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is the antithesis of Clinton’s record on these issues and stood by the noble causes advocated by Black Lives Matter, long before they were popular. In the interest of fairness, and the fact that Sanders has a better record on race and gay rights than Clinton, activists should also focus on the Clinton Campaign in 2016.

This item would not be mentioned as a stand-alone argument for proving that Hillary is a racist. But it adds weight and credability to the other items of evidence that Hillary is a racist. The problem is that people who are faithful to Hillary will look at all of these points and find the weakest one in the group and attack it. But the items in this list in this blog are not links in a chain and you do not discredit the premise of the entire blog by attacking one single link. Instead, this blog should be looked upon as parts of a whole case. The way to determine what is true and what is not true is to look at all of the facts, not cherry pick the weakest point and think you are going to make a difference by cheery picking one item.

Almost no one knows Bill Clinton better than Dolly Kyle, the ex-president’s former childhood friend, confidante and lover. And in a recent interview with Sean Hannity, Kyle leveled an explosive charge at presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, one which could rock the 2016 presidential election.

Hannity asked if Kyle was accusing the former first lady of racism. Kyle did not back down, repeating the charge and even saying the same could be true of the man she calls “Billy” Clinton.

“I am absolutely suggesting she’s racist,” she said. “And I talk in the book about the racial discrimination lawsuits that were filed against Billy when he was governor that were filed by blacks and by Hispanics. Did you know that at one point he told the Arkansas state police to stop and search every car driven by a Hispanic in the state of Arkansas? And they sued him, took him to federal court, he got reprimanded by a federal judge, and he got so mad about that, he told the state troopers they could stop and search any car they wanted to search.”

The scandal is just one of the dozens Kyle describes in her new book “Hillary: The Other Woman,” which is now rocketing up the charts at Amazon.com and is the No. 1 new release in the category of “Presidents and Heads of State Biographies.” It has already gotten more than 50 exuberant reviews and boasts an average of 4.8 out of five stars.

I have been reading more reports on Kyle's book. It is worse than you might imagine. She clearly states that both Bill Clinton and Hillary are racists. She insists that the Clinton's called Reverend Jessie Jackson "that goddam nigger" (see infowars.com). I am sure Hillary will deny this, but, given her track record as a proven liar, she can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.

#22. Hillary Clinton admires Margaret Sanger.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is either a nefarious sociopath on a mission to do as much destruction in this world as possible in her lifetime, or an incompetent fumbler and bumbler stumbling through the world. She carelessly causing harm and damage to everyone close to her and, whenever possible, as far as her reach and power extends either intentionally or unintentionally. Either way, she is not fit for command. Writing editorials and reports of her misdeeds and mistakes is only a question of time. She has provided an endless stream for me to make note of. All I have to do is draw attention to what she has done that is easy to find.

I would like to think that Hillary Clinton was just simply being ignorant when she praised one of the most evil genocidal maniacs in history. I assume Hillary did so simply because Margaret Sanger was responsible for creating an organization that became "Planned Parenthood" and that Hillary is a staunch "Pro Choice" supporter. But, after reading a series of Sanger's quotes, it is obvious that her reasons for starting Planned Parenthood did hot have honorable or respectable intentions.

I will list some of the disturbing things Margaret Sanger has written below but for now I will state perhaps her most infamous one that best reflects her mindset: "we don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population". If you read all of her quotes you get the sense that Sanger wanted to use birth control as a means of promoting a racist agenda. In fact one of her quotes is: “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

Sanger was a monster. Did Hillary not know this when she praised Sanger with "I admire Margaret Sanger enormously... I am really in awe of her" . I would like to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt and assume that starting Planned Parenthood is a good (to Hillary) that overshadows any bad. But there is a whole lot of bad here. At worst, Hillary knows and does not care. At best Hillary does not know but she should have known. Either way, Hillary is unfit for command. It should also be noted that Hillary never provided a retraction, apology, or clarification. I assume that she hopes this will all just blow over. I also believe that if this had gotten any media attention, she would have dealt with it. We should not want a president like this. We should expect better.

Here is a list of 12 Disturbing Quotes from Margaret Sanger: Planned Parenthood’s Foundress taken from profile365.com

Apparently, supporting and advocating eugenics earns you a place of honor in today’s world. If you’re Francis Galton, who coined the term, eugenics meaning “well born,” then you’re forgotten. If you’re Margaret Sanger, then the world’s largest abortion provider names an annual award after you.

Margaret Sanger began in 1923 the American Birth Control League. It would go on to become Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Back in March 2014, Nancy Pelosi, a self-professed Catholic, and current Minority Leader in the US House of Representatives, was given the dubious “Margaret Sanger Award.”

So, what did Sanger stand for? To give you an idea, here are 12 quotes:

1) “[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children… [Women must have the right] to live … to love… to be lazy … to be an unmarried mother … to create… to destroy… The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order… The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

2) “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

3) “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

“I think you must agree… that the campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics… Birth control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the eugenic educator.

“As an advocate of birth control I wish… to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation.

“On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

“[Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.

“Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant…

“We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

6) “One fundamental fact alone, however, indicates the necessity of Birth Control if eugenics is to accomplish its purpose…

“Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.”

7) The government ought to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”

And the government should “give certain dysgenic groups (those with ‘bad genes’) in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”

8) “The third group [of society] are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequences of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”

– Margaret Sanger. Speech quoted in Birth Control: What It Is, How It Works, What It Will Do. The Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference. Held at the Hotel Plaza, New York City, November 11-12, 1921. Published by the Birth Control Review, pages 172 and 174 (emphasis mine).

9) “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back. [Mandatory] sterilization for these is the answer.”

10) “In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit.’ Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.”

12) “Birth Control is not merely an individual problem; it is not merely a national question, it concerns the whole wide world, the ultimate destiny of the human race.

“Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.”

Again, Margaret Sanger is the woman Planned Parenthood proudly affiliates with, and calls a “great hero.” In fact, although not mentioning Sanger’s obvious efforts to promote eugenics, Planned Parenthood goes on to state “Sanger’s early efforts remain the hallmark of Planned Parenthood’s mission.”

Millennials shocked by racist Hillary quotes, think they’re from Trump By James Ring

Millennials have derided Donald Trump for his “racist” and “insensitive” rhetoric, but voters are unaware that Hillary Clinton has said many things during her political career that people would’ve criticized had the same words came from Donald Trump.

Campus Reform traveled to Georgetown University to play a game with students in which they had six outrageous phrases and facts, then asked students to guess whether Clinton or Trump said it.

One of the questions Campus Reform asked students was, “Which candidate made a joke about ‘colored people time’ saying that black people are always late?” Another question: “Which candidate suggested a 12-year-old rape victim made up accusations because she enjoyed ‘fantasizing about older men?’”

Most students answered Donald Trump.

However, all six quotes were from Hillary Clinton. All of the students were shocked when they found out. Many of the students said their opinion of her was more negative after hearing the things that she has said and done.

“Makes me dislike her even more I guess,” one student said.

“She’s very untrustworthy in my eyes,” another student commented.

A different student summed up the reactions by saying, “if she claims to stand for all these things, but then she says the opposite, then people would probably question voting for her.”

NEW YORK – Just as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump begins to court black voters, Dinesh D’Souza’s blockbuster film recounting the Democratic Party’s history of racism, “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,” is gearing up for a fall election thrust, reopening in 500 theaters nationwide in September and October.

In an interview with WND, D’Souza expressed enthusiasm for the Trump campaign’s effort to appeal to black voters.

“This is a first for a GOP candidate in modern times,” D’Souza said. “It’s important for Trump and the Republican Party to break the virtual monopoly Democrats have had on the black vote, but also to explode the moral capital of the Democratic Party.”

“The GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln, and I want our party to be the home of the African-American voter once again,” Trump said. “I want a totally inclusive country and I want an inclusive party.”

He said Democrats “claim to be for the underdog – for women and minorities – while in reality the Democratic Party has been systematic oppressors of underdogs, including African-Americans.”

D’Souza commended Trump for his recent speeches and urged the campaign to utilize his movie.

“Our film, ‘Hillary’s America,’ makes the argument the Democratic Party has oppressed African-Americans by citing historical facts in depth to destroy the progressive myth that since Abraham Lincoln the parties have switched sides,” D’Souza said.

D’Souza said he would like to assist the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and pro-Trump Super PACs in any way he can to bring the argument to independent voters and minorities.

He contends, as does Trump, that the Republican Party is an inclusive party open to advancing the interests of black voters.

Trump: See ‘Hillary’s America’

The Trump campaign did not respond to WND requests for comment.

D’Souza confirmed he has sent copies of the “Hillary’s America” DVD to the Trump campaign.

On July 16, Trump retweeted a message encouraging his supporters to see “Hillary’s America.

Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary—or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded. Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.

Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we—black people—are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.

And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries. Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison state—many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life. Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.

What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?

No. Quite the opposite.

* * *

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, urban black communities across America were suffering from economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs had vanished as factories moved overseas in search of cheaper labor, a new plantation. Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard. Unemployment rates among young black men had quadrupled as the rate of industrial employment plummeted. Crime rates spiked in inner-city communities that had been dependent on factory jobs, while hopelessness, despair, and crack addiction swept neighborhoods that had once been solidly working-class. Millions of black folks—many of whom had fled Jim Crow segregation in the South with the hope of obtaining decent work in Northern factories—were suddenly trapped in racially segregated, jobless ghettos.

On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton made the economy his top priority and argued persuasively that conservatives were using race to divide the nation and divert attention from the failed economy. In practice, however, he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did.

We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare. Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” and condemning “big government.” Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.

Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages, appealing to African Americans by belting out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in black churches, while at the same time signaling to poor and working-class whites that he was willing to be tougher on black communities than Republicans had been.

Clinton was praised for his no-nonsense, pragmatic approach to racial politics. He won the election and appointed a racially diverse cabinet that “looked like America.” He won re-election four years later, and the American economy rebounded. Democrats cheered. The Democratic Party had been saved. The Clintons won. Guess who lost?

* * *

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets—but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.

Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”

When Clinton left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have contributed to mass incarceration, but as Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson recently observed, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”

Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before. She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures. That record, and her statements from that era, should be scrutinized. In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Both Clintons now express regret over the crime bill, and Hillary says she supports criminal-justice reforms to undo some of the damage that was done by her husband’s administration. But on the campaign trail, she continues to invoke the economy and country that Bill Clinton left behind as a legacy she would continue. So what exactly did the Clinton economy look like for black Americans? Taking a hard look at this recent past is about more than just a choice between two candidates. It’s about whether the Democratic Party can finally reckon with what its policies have done to African-American communities, and whether it can redeem itself and rightly earn the loyalty of black voters.

* * *

An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.

Why is this not common knowledge? Because government statistics like poverty and unemployment rates do not include incarcerated people. As Harvard sociologist Bruce Western explains: “Much of the optimism about declines in racial inequality and the power of the US model of economic growth is misplaced once we account for the invisible poor, behind the walls of America’s prisons and jails.” When Clinton left office in 2001, the true jobless rate for young, non-college-educated black men (including those behind bars) was 42 percent. This figure was never reported. Instead, the media claimed that unemployment rates for African Americans had fallen to record lows, neglecting to mention that this miracle was possible only because incarceration rates were now at record highs. Young black men weren’t looking for work at high rates during the Clinton era because they were now behind bars—out of sight, out of mind, and no longer counted in poverty and unemployment statistics.

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.” In his 1996 State of the Union address, given during his re-election campaign, Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).

They are not just gangs of kids anymore…they are ‘super-predators.’ —Hillary Clinton, speaking in support of the 1994 crime bill

Experts and pundits disagree about the true impact of welfare reform, but one thing seems clear: Extreme poverty doubled to 1.5 million in the decade and a half after the law was passed. What is extreme poverty? US households are considered to be in extreme poverty if they are surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month. We tend to think of extreme poverty existing in Third World countries, but here in the United States, shocking numbers of people are struggling to survive on less money per month than many families spend in one evening dining out. Currently, the United States, the richest nation on the planet, has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the developed world.

Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn’t reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton’s tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. The Clinton administration eliminated Pell grants for prisoners seeking higher education to prepare for their release, supported laws denying federal financial aid to students with drug convictions, and signed legislation imposing a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense—an exceptionally harsh provision given the racially biased drug war that was raging in inner cities.

Perhaps most alarming, Clinton also made it easier for public-housing agencies to deny shelter to anyone with any sort of criminal history (even an arrest without conviction) and championed the “one strike and you’re out” initiative, which meant that families could be evicted from public housing because one member (or a guest) had committed even a minor offense. People released from prison with no money, no job, and nowhere to go could no longer return home to their loved ones living in federally assisted housing without placing the entire family at risk of eviction. Purging “the criminal element” from public housing played well on the evening news, but no provisions were made for people and families as they were forced out on the street. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, more than half of working-age African-American men in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and basic public benefits—relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.

It is difficult to overstate the damage that’s been done. Generations have been lost to the prison system; countless families have been torn apart or rendered homeless; and a school-to-prison pipeline has been born that shuttles young people from their decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

* * *

It didn’t have to be like this. As a nation, we had a choice. Rather than spending billions of dollars constructing a vast new penal system, those billions could have been spent putting young people to work in inner-city communities and investing in their schools so they might have some hope of making the transition from an industrial to a service-based economy. Constructive interventions would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos, but for blue-collar workers of all colors. At the very least, Democrats could have fought to prevent the further destruction of black communities rather than ratcheting up the wars declared on them.

Of course, it can be said that it’s unfair to criticize the Clintons for punishing black people so harshly, given that many black people were on board with the “get tough” movement too. It is absolutely true that black communities back then were in a state of crisis, and that many black activists and politicians were desperate to get violent offenders off the streets. What is often missed, however, is that most of those black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness. They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare. In the end, they wound up with police and prisons. To say that this was what black people wanted is misleading at best.

By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps.

To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics and policies have worked out for black people. Bill says that he “overshot the mark” with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine, and abolish private prisons, among other measures.

But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era, but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.

This is not an endorsement for Bernie Sanders, who after all voted for the 1994 crime bill. I also tend to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the way the Sanders campaign handled the question of reparations is one of many signs that Bernie doesn’t quite get what’s at stake in serious dialogues about racial justice. He was wrong to dismiss reparations as “divisive,” as though centuries of slavery, segregation, discrimination, ghettoization, and stigmatization aren’t worthy of any specific acknowledgement or remedy.

But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.

The biggest problem with Bernie, in the end, is that he’s running as a Democrat—as a member of a political party that not only capitulated to right-wing demagoguery but is now owned and controlled by a relatively small number of millionaires and billionaires. Yes, Sanders has raised millions from small donors, but should he become president, he would also become part of what he has otherwise derided as “the establishment.” Even if Bernie’s racial-justice views evolve, I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.

Of course, the idea of building a new political party terrifies most progressives, who understandably fear that it would open the door for a right-wing extremist to get elected. So we play the game of lesser evils. This game has gone on for decades. W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, shocked many when he refused to play along with this game in the 1956 election, defending his refusal to vote on the grounds that “there is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I do or say.” While the true losers and winners of this game are highly predictable, the game of lesser evils makes for great entertainment and can now be viewed 24 hours a day on cable-news networks. Hillary believes that she can win this game in 2016 because this time she’s got us, the black vote, in her back pocket—her lucky card.

She may be surprised to discover that the younger generation no longer wants to play her game. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all continue to play along and pretend that we don’t know how it will turn out in the end. Hopefully, one day, we’ll muster the courage to join together in a revolutionary movement with people of all colors who believe that basic human rights and economic, racial, and gender justice are not unreasonable, pie-in-the-sky goals. After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up, stretch its limbs, and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to reshuffle this deck.

I received an email today from a black elder asking me to reprint a column I wrote for an African American newspaper in April of 2008 detailing the persistent racism in the Clinton campaign as it tried to derail Barack Obama’s historic run for the American presidency. She wanted me to “remind the American people of how far the Clintons had stooped” a mere eight years ago. I am reproducing the column below, following Sunday night’s presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton clung to the Obama mantle despite her — and her husband’s — racist dog whistling against Obama in 2008.

New York City, NY — In the aftermath of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary [won narrowly by Hillary Clinton] — a race in which Clinton had a 20-point lead only a few months ago — the racism and hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign were laid bare for all a nation to scorn.

Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.

In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.

In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.

Then came the disgraceful remarks of Geraldine Ferraro, who could not, and would not, shut her mouth. “If Obama was a white man,” she charged, “he would not be in this position.” And she was adamant and unapologetic amid the resulting outcry. “Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she proclaimed. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white.”

Say what?

The Clintons refused to publicly call for Ferraro’s resignation. Ferraro remained unrepentant when she finally did resign. “The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you,” she bitterly wrote Hillary. And she never apologized for her remarks.

To anyone who has followed the Clinton campaign closely, it is all too apparent that her top political strategists — reeling from losses from coast to coast and badly miscalculating the grassroots power of the Obama movement — made a tactical decision to go negative, as that would be the only way for Clinton to stop Obama and somehow allow her to steal the nomination.

And go negative they did — with a subtle yet consistent racism underscoring every turn. The now notorious red-phone-at-3:00-a.m. television ad used by Clinton during the Texas primary, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson noted in the New York Times, was reminiscent of D. W. Griffith’s racist film Birth of a Nation, which helped revive the Ku Klux Klan.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell, who headed up Clinton’s campaign, was publicly saying that white voters in the Keystone State would not vote for Obama because he was black. Rendell’s remarks were racist from the get-go, but no one in the white media called him on it. Indeed, the media began playing the game.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — who worked as Bill Clinton’s press secretary and lied through his teeth on Clinton’s behalf (where’s the journalistic “objectivity” here?) — brought up Obama’s relationship to former ‘60s radical Bill Ayers. And the rest of the media went bonkers over Obama’s all-too-honest remarks about conservative white voters hanging on to God and guns.

Amidst so much fury signifying nothing, Hillary Clinton finally did her own bidding. Racism is as racism does. She boldly linked Obama with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Wright with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. That linkage was patently racist at its core — yet, once again, no one in the mainstream media so much as blinked. In so doing, Clinton was echoing the views of Fox News’ resident racist Sean Hannity. Talk about shameful.

And when asked about Reverend Wright by The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Clinton declared, “Given all that we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor. While we don’t have a choice when it comes to our relatives, we do have a choice when it comes to our pastors or our church.”

As anyone who has read the two major recent biographies of Hillary Clinton (Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.; and A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein) knows all too well, she will do whatever she has to do and say whatever she has to say in the unbridled (and unscrupulous) pursuit of power. The ash heap of her duplicity sprawls across decades and across various regions of this country — from Arkansas to the White House, from Illinois to, well, now, Pennsylvania.

Clinton is an inveterate liar — I am sorry, there is truly no other word for it — and as her ill-fated presidential campaign tumbles toward its inevitable demise, the personal deception that is at the core of her personality, and of her career, continues to reveal itself.

As we all know, truth may be slow of foot, but it is always inevitable. Only this past weekend, as Clinton continued to reference Reverend Wright in her stump speeches, the filmmaker Michael Moore reminded us that in 1998, Reverend Wright had actually been a guest at the Clinton White House, for a “prayer breakfast,” after Bill Clinton’s rather tawdry affair with intern Monica Lewinsky had been made public.

“Thank you so much for your kind message,” Clinton wrote Wright after his visit. “I am touched by your prayers and by the many expressions of encouragement and support I have received from friends across our country. You have my best wishes.”

And guess what? According to the just released schedules of Hillary Clinton by the National Archives, she was in attendance at that breakfast, too. With the one-and-only Jeremiah Wright. While her husband was seeking salvation and forgiveness.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

But not surprising. “We know there are still many Americans who will never vote for a black man,” Moore observed. “Hillary knows it, too. She’s counting on it.”

If you want more reasons why Hillary and Bill are racist, I can give you about one million more. Bill Clinton has gone on record saying a number of times that he could have stopped or lessened the Rwandan genocide. He says it in different ways as time goes on. He once said that he could have completely stopped the genocide with one bombing of the radio station what was fueling the tribal hatred.

I remember seeing and hearing him say this on state at a university when he was interviewed about the genocide. I tried to find it on youtube but I only found where he is currently giving clever sounding excuses for not doing anything to stop the genocide.

Consider this. The Clinton's wasted little time in getting involved in peacekeeping to stop the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. So why hesitate or ignore the genocide in Rwanda? The only difference between the two events is that one group were European whites and the other were African blacks. Since almost one million people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and the USA had the means to stop or lessen it, the Clinton's have their blood on their hands.

Clinton’s actions during the Rwandan genocide were worse than is usually remembered…

“If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything,” Bill Clinton said before becoming president, “it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide. Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done. We must not permit that to happen again.”

Clinton’s words were stirring, but they reflected a broad consensus among the Western powers after World War II: another Holocaust could not be allowed to occur. By the time of the Clinton Administration, this had become an article of American political faith, one of the country’s few solid moral commitments: whatever other misfortunes we might inflict through our actions and inactions across the globe, the United States would never permit the tragedies of 1939-1945 to replay themselves.

The events in Rwanda during 1994 would be the true test of the country’s commitment to the principle. It was the precise scenario that each president had solemnly sworn an oath to prevent. Moreover, the country had the resources, opportunity, and knowledge necessary to help. It was, fundamentally, an event that could have been stopped, or at least significantly mitigated, through the taking of steps that were known and feasible. But over the course of 100 days, as literally hundreds of thousands of bodies piled up in Rwanda, President Clinton did exactly what he had promised he would never do; he remained “silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide,” and even as his “fragmentary awareness grew into indisputable facts,” he lackadaisically “permitted it to happen again.”

But even worse, and seldom acknowledged, is that Clinton did something far worse. He did not just “sit on his hands”: he deliberately stalled the efforts of others to intervene, and went so far as to deny the genocide in order to avoid being pressured to stop it.

The most important thing to understand, in analyzing international responsibility for the genocide, is whether enough information was available to the decision-makers. A person cannot be held accountable for not stopping something he did not know was occurring. Indeed, Bill Clinton, accordingto Samantha Power, “is said to have convinced himself that if he had known more, he would have done more.” He claimedin 1998 that he did not “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” Clinton offers his present-day charitable works in Rwanda as proof that once he is made aware of suffering there, he will dedicate himself diligently to alleviating it, that he would never leave Rwanda to perish if he knew he was capable of acting.

But Clinton’s claim not to have fully understood the situation is a lie. Clinton knew. Knew there was a genocide, knew its scale. People at all levels of government knew. It was all over the press. In fact, the idea that any informed official at the time could plead ignorance to the Rwandan genocide is laughable. As time passes, it may be easier and easier to blur the history, to suggest that everything was opaque and uncertain and that it would have taken impossible omniscience in order to understand. But the violence in Rwanda was in the newspapers. It wasn’t just the stuff of minor internal State Department memoranda and overlooked faxes at the bottom of receptionists’ inboxes. It was in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Administration’s spokespeople was being regularly asked about it.

It’s easy enough, if we know nothing about it, to accept the proposition that the scale of the Rwanda genocide became clear only after the fact. Fog of war and all that. It certainly comports with the received image of Africa as a dark and unfathomable continent, out of which reliable information never flows. But any glance through contemporary sources instantly invalidates this view of history. To say one didn’t know is not just implausible or unlikely. It is a lie.

When assessing the question of “knowledge,” and the subsequent issue of culpability, it is vital to keep in mind the timeline of the genocide, and to figure out what information was available at what points. Again, remember that President Clinton, in tearfully apologizing to Rwandans, said he did not “fully appreciate the depth and the speed” with which Rwandans were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

On April 6th, 1994, the day before the Rwandan genocide began, the country’s president had been assassinated, his plane shot down over Kigali by parties unknown. It was the small spark necessary to trigger a genocide; the president was a Hutu, and the killing provided the necessary pretext for the country’s military forces to carry out a plan they had been working on for some time: the extermination of their ethnic rivals, the Tutsi minority. On April 7th, a motley assemblage of paramilitary forces, under the direction of high-ranking members of the political elite, began a concerted program of mass slaughter. Inspired by an apocalyptic “Hutu Power” ideology, and fueled by “hate radio” stations commanding ordinary citizens to kill, groups of machete-wielding death squads roamed through the country, killing every Tutsi they could find, as well as moderate Hutus. In this nationwide paroxysm of stabbing, raping, and shooting, hundreds of thousands would be killed over the next 100 days.

The Rwandan president was assassinated on the 6th, a Wednesday. The killings began on Thursday the 7th and lasted three months. On the Thursday, members of the Presidential Guard killed eleven Belgian UN peacekeepers, as well as the Rwandan prime minister. On Friday the 8th, Bill Clinton publicly stated that the prime minister had been “sought out and murdered. Reuters described a “wave of bloodletting” in which “embers of the security forces and gangs of youths wielding machetes, knives and clubs rampaged through the capital, Kigali, settling tribal scores by hacking and clubbing people to death or shooting them.”

On Saturday, April 9th, Clinton included references to Rwanda in his weekly radio address (which was “otherwise devoted to crime and other domestic issues” and focused largely on Clinton’s pitch for his crime bill.) Of the situation there, he said:

Finally, let me say just a brief word about a very tragic situation in the African nation of Rwanda. I’m deeply concerned about the continuing violence… There are about 250 Americans there. I’m very concerned about their safety, and I want you to know that we’re doing all we can to ensure their safety.

That same day, United Nations observers in Kigali witnessed a massacre that took place in a Polish church, in which over one hundred people including children were brutally hacked to death. The New York Times described Rwanda and Burundi as “two nations joined by a common history of genocide,” raising the specter of the g-word.

On the 11th, The New York Times publishedthe accounts of Americans who had recently evacuated:

‘It was the most basic terror,’ said Chris Grundmann, 37, an American evacuee, describing the fears of the Rwandan civilians and officials who were targets of the violence. He and his family, hunkered down in their house with mattresses against the windows, heard the ordeals of Rwandan victims over a two-way radio.‘The U.N. radio was filled with national staff screaming for help,’ he said. ‘They were begging: ‘Come save me! My house is being blown up,’ or ‘They’re killing me.’ There was nothing we could do. At one point we just had to turn it off.’ Since Wednesday, it is estimated that more than 20,000 people have been killed in fighting between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority that have struggled for dominance since Rwanda won independence from Belgium in 1962. On Friday alone, the main hospital had many hundreds of bodies before noon. Mr. Grundmann, an official with the Centers for Disease Control [said that] the family’s cook, a Tutsi, came to their home begging for help on Friday after having spent three days pretending to be dead. ‘He told us that on Wednesday night someone had thrown a grenade into his home… He escaped through an open window, but he thinks his wife and children died. For 36 hours he played dead in a marsh. There were bodies all through the marsh. He said there were heads being thrown in.’

On April 12th, The New York Times printed a profile of several Adventist missionaries who had fled:

“Now that we are out,” Mr. Van Lanen said today, “I fear, in a way, that we have betrayed the people we came to help. Now, they fear that most of those people—deprived of their protection—will become victims of the bloodletting that has set the majority Hutu tribe of Rwanda against the minority Tutsis. Red Cross officials estimate that the violence has taken more than 10,000 lives in Kigali alone, and as many or more in the countryside

That same day, Toronto’s Globe and Mail ran a report containing interviews with traumatized Canadians who had evacuated:

“There were bodies everywhere. Wounded people were not getting any attention. Women with children on their backs were hacked to pieces. I saw one man still alive who was disembowelled, another had almost been cut in half with a panga (a long, sharp knife).” The streets of Kigali were like a “slaughterhouse” and “blood was literally flowing in the gutters.”

On the 15th, The New York Times published a report about the refugees gathered in at the Hotel Milles Collines, later made well-known in the film Hotel Rwanda:

In Kigali, scores of Rwandans have taken refuge at the Hotel Mille Collines. There is an uneasy, nervous coexistence there between the families of the Rwandan military and some middle-class Tutsis who were unable to leave the city. Both are convinced they will be massacred. They congregate in the dark hallways, whispering for hours, virtual prisoners. As United Nations soldiers came to take the foreign journalists to the airport, dozens of the Rwandans crowded around and begged to be evacuated, fearing that the departure of Westerners would mean sure death for them. Their pleas were rejected by the troops. As the convoy left, many gathered silently in the driveway and stared.

On the 16th, the Montreal Gazette published a desperate plea from a Rwandan exile, under the headline “Don’t abandon us”:

[Fidele Makombe] says he was stunned by the orgy of murder, rape and torture unleashed in the small central African nation… Human-rights observers are convinced that the coterie of ethnic Hutus around the president used the incident as a pretext to unleash a reign of terror… Makombe, who runs the Rwandese Human Rights League from his base here, is appealing to the world not to kiss off Rwanda as another African human-rights basket case, but to understand the true nature of the conflict…

The killings in Rwanda were no secret, then. Every day, the papers were full of them; these are random examples, one could offer many, many more clippings from the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the various wire services, and these were just from the first weeks of a genocide that went on unimpeded for three months without Clinton acting. By April 24th, the Sunday Washington Post was filled with pleas from Human Rights Watch, who explained unequivocally what was going on:

We put the word genocide on the table. We don’t do it lightly. There is clearly here an intention an eliminate the Tutsi as a people… This is not “inter-tribal fighting” or “ethnic conflict.” First, it’s not fighting, it’s slaughter…

A front page Post story from the same day described “the heads and limbs of victims… sorted and piled neatly, a bone-chilling order in the midst of chaos that harked back to the Holocaust.”

To not “fully appreciate” what was going on would have required not glancing at a newspaper for the three months from the beginning of April to the beginning of July.

It’s important to provide excerpts from some of these contemporary media accounts, so as not to accidentally lapse into believing that the genocide was something hidden or unknown. After such a calamity, for which so many are culpable, a great number of people have vested interests in downplaying the extent to which the genocide was (1) knowable and (2) preventable. If only to spare themselves a lifetime of guilt, they must publicly repeat that the situation was unclear, and that nothing could be done. But the historical record says otherwise; very little was unclear, and even those things that were unknown on April 8th were certainly clear by the 20th, when fleeing survivors’ reports of genocide were being recounted in the press daily. As April turned to May, the nation’s papers were openly puzzled by Clinton’s refusal to do anything. On May 2nd, the editorial board of USA Today angrily denounced Clinton for his uselessness:

Imagine the horror of watching 25 mutilated bodies float down a local river – every hour. Try to picture 250,000 North Carolinians abandoning their homes and belongings in a terrified run for their lives from machete-wielding madmen. That’s what life is like these days in Rwanda, a small but densely populated Central African nation where as many as 200,000 men, women and children have been slaughtered in the past three weeks… Where is the world’s horror? And, more immediately, where is the world’s outrage? Surely, if hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were hacked to death in France or Germany, the international call for action would be swift and strong. But Rwanda is in Africa. And, unfortunately, the Western world reacts slowly to black-on-black violence. President Clinton, who criticized George Bush for not doing more to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, certainly took his time getting around to this genocide. Only last weekend did he finally deliver a radio address, broadcast in Rwanda, pleading for an end to the violence. That’s about three weeks – 200,000 victims – too slow.

But if the editors at USA Today thought Clinton would spring into action after 200,000 victims, they were mistaken. Besides the evacuation of Americans, Clinton’s radio address to Rwandans (which Human Rights Watch called “so mild as to be worthless”) would constitute the full extent of the U.S.’s action in the country until July.

In fact, there was a conscious commitment to inaction by the Clinton Administration. As Princeton Lyman, then serving as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa recalls, “[p]eople knew what was going on…There certainly was information flowing in. The African Bureau at the State Department was pleading for the Pentagon to bomb the hate radio stations. People had information. There was just a reluctance to do very much.” Former State Department military advisor Tony Marley describes a meeting at the State Department:

One official even asked a question as to what possible outcome there might be on the congressional elections later that year were the administration to acknowledge that this was genocide taking place in Rwanda and be seen to do nothing about it. The concern obviously was whether it would result in a loss of votes for the party in the November elections… I was stunned because I didn’t see what bearing that had on whether or not genocide was, in fact, taking place in Rwanda. Partisan political vote-gathering in the U.S. had no bearing on the objective reality in Rwanda.

Marley said that even modest proposal for action were instantly rejected. When Marley suggested that they at least attempt to jam the frequencies hate radio stations that were fueling the genocide, a State Department lawyer told him it would go against the spirit of the U.S. Constitution’s commitment to free speech. (For the record, United States constitutional law does not protect the right to order a genocide on the radio.)

But the Clinton Administration actually did something much, much worse than failing to intervene. It deliberately attempted to downplay the atrocities, refusing to refer to them publicly as genocide, for fear that doing so would obligate them under the U.S.’s Genocide Convention to take action. As The Guardian reported in 2004, classified documents showed that “President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction… Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.” “Detailed reports” were reaching the top levels of government; Secretary of State Warren Christopher “and almost certainly the president” had been told mid-April that there was “genocide and partition” and a “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis.” The CIA’s national intelligence briefing, circulated to Clinton, Al Gore, and other top officials, “included almost daily reports on Rwanda,” with an April 23 briefing saying that rebels were attempting to “stop the genocide, which… is spreading south.” As William Ferroggiaro of the National Security Archive explained, declassified documents show that “[d]iplomats, intelligence agencies, defense and military officials – even aid workers – provided timely information up the chain… That the Clinton administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda.” Joyce Leader, U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali, admitted in 2014 that “We had a very good sense of what was taking place.”

But nobody in the United States government was willing to use the word “genocide” publicly. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide contains a binding requirement that countries prevent genocide, so acknowledgment of the genocide would have created a legally binding mandate to stop it. Even though internally, members of the Clinton Administration were referring to a genocide, publicly their spokespeople were under strict orders to refuse to confirm that a genocide was occurring, for fear that it “could inflame public calls for action.”

“Be careful,” warned a document from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense’s office, “Legal at State was worried about this yesterday – Genocide finding could commit U.S.G. to actually ‘do something.’”

The resulting press conferences took Clintonian hairsplitting to its most absurd outer limits. Here, reporters try to pin down State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

REPORTER 1: —comment on that, or a view as to whether or not what is happening could be genocide?

CHRISTINE SHELLEY: Well, as I think you know, the use of the term “genocide” has a very precise legal meaning, although it’s not strictly a legal determination. There are—there are other factors in there, as well. When—in looking at a situation to make a determination about that, before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation.

REPORTER 2: Just out of curiosity, given that so many people say that there is genocide underway, or something that strongly resembles it, why wouldn’t this convention be invoked?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think, as you know, this becomes a legal definitional thing, unfortunately, in terms of—as horrendous as all these things are, there becomes a definitional question.

Finally, at the end of May, as hundreds of thousands lay dead across Rwanda, the Clinton Administration changed its policy and began using the term. But even then they took great pains to use a carefully-constructed legalism; while they would admit that there may have been “acts of genocide” occurring, they drew a distinction between these and “genocide,” in the apparent belief that this would keep them from triggering the Genocide Convention.

Again, reporters tried to get a straight answer:

CHRISTINE SHELLEY: We have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred.

ALAN ELSNER (REUTERS): How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

CHRISTINE SHELLEY: Alan, that’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer.

ALAN ELSNER: Is it true that the—that you have specific guidance not use the word “genocide” in isolation, but always to preface it with this—this word, “acts of”?

CHRISTINE SHELLEY: I have guidance, which—to which I—which I try to use as best as I can. I’m not—I have—there are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of.

Alan Elsner later described his incredulity at the Administration’s non-responsiveness:

The answers they were giving were really non-answers. They would talk in incredibly bureaucratic language. In a sense, it was almost like a caricature. If you look at it now, it looks utterly ridiculous. These were all kind of artful ways of doing nothing, which is what they were determined to do.

Not only did the Clinton Administration adopt a policy of refusing to recognize the genocide, but it pressured other countries to do the same. Former Czech Ambassador to the U.N. Karel Kovanda recalled that his government was pressured by the U.S. not to use the term:

KAREL KOVANDA: I know that I personally had an important conversation with one of my superiors in Prague who at American behest suggested that they lay off.

INTERVIEWER: So the Americans had actually talked to your government back in Prague and said, ‘Don’t let’s call it genocide.’

KAREL KOVANDA: In Prague or in Washington, but they were talking to my superiors, yes.

There is much to be revolted by here. Despite Clinton’s promise that he would never sit idly by while genocide was occurring, not only was he doing exactly that, but his administration actually perpetrated a planned act of genocide denial specifically in order to avoid having to prevent a genocide from occurring. As The Guardian reported, the Clinton Administration, “felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.” Thanks to Rwanda’s lack of minerals, the world’s most powerful nation was content to let 800,000 people have their faces chopped off with machetes.

But even this underplays the Clinton Administration’s responsibility. It’s true that the U.S. government both deliberately refused to send forces to Rwanda and deceived the world about whether a genocide was occurring. It’s also true that both then and now, Bill Clinton pretended that there was too little information to come to any conclusions all while receiving detailed briefings on the genocide (as it was simultaneously splashed across the daily papers). But perhaps even worse, the Clinton Administration actually took affirmative steps to keep the United Nations from sending a force to Rwanda. As Samantha Power explains:

In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements.

“Recall,” said former special envoy to Somalia Robert Oakley, “it wasn’t just not sending U.S. forces: we blocked a security council resolution to send in a U.N. force.” Indeed, Clinton Administration deliberately stalled United Nations efforts to coordinate an intervention. According to Foreign Policy, “[w]hen the genocide began, the United States launched a diplomatic campaign aimed at bringing the U.N. peacekeepers home. Initially, Washington sought to shutter the mission entirely.” On May 17th, The New York Times reported that “The United States forced the United Nations… to scale down its plans and put off sending 5,500 African troops to Rwanda in an effort to end the violence there… Washington argued that sending in a large peacekeeping force raised the risk of the troops’ being caught up in the fighting.” There was “a decisive U.S. role in the tragic pullout of United Nations peacekeepers” and each time the United Nations attempted to formulate a modest plan for reprieve, the United States stalled it, even to the extent of using its Security Council veto power over other nations.

One may wonder why the Clinton Administration acted so callously in the face of such a preventable catastrophe. But one need not wonder long. The relevant considerations were explained by Bill Clinton during his commencement speech at the Naval Academy in May of 1994, during the middle of the genocide:

Now the entire global terrain is bloody with such conflicts, from Rwanda to Georgia… Whether we get involved in any of the world’s ethnic conflicts, in the end, must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests at stake.

There, in plain language, was Clinton’s philosophy. “The cumulative weight of the American interests at stake” were the deciding factor when it came to “ethnic conflicts” like the Rwandan genocide. With few American interests in Kigali (no minerals), there was little that needed to be done.

Clinton’s close political advisor, Dick Morris, was even more explicit in describing the president’s reasoning:

The real reason was that Rwanda was black. Bosnia was white. European atrocities mattered more than African atrocities—not to Clinton himself, but to the media, which covered the grisly deaths in Yugoslavia but devoted considerably less attention to the genocide in Africa. And without the media dogging him to take action, Bill Clinton…wasn’t about to pay attention.

The words of a jaded and disreputable operative like Dick Morris may of course be taken with some skepticism. And he underplays the extent to which the media was covering the genocide. But as USA Today noted, it’s hard to believe that if the same circumstances had occurred in a European country, Clinton would have shown the same level of indifference. The president’s treatment of Rwanda had everything to do with a political calculus; Administration officials were openly concerned with the situation’s effects on the November election. (They lost anyway.)

Bill Clinton has struggled to explain why he did not intervene in Rwanda. In 1998, he visited Kigali and offered what some have described as an “apology,” though it did not contain much actual apologizing. In that statement, Clinton admitted that “[i]t may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate” the depth of the terror.

Indeed it did seem strange, because it was, in fact, impossible. As Rwanda scholar Timothy Longman wrote, “Clinton’s claims were false. It is not that the U.S. government didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda. The truth is that we didn’t care.” And as Samantha Power has concluded, “[a]s the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.”

Even as he constructed the appearance of regret, then, Bill Clinton was engaging in political spin. Dana Hughes of ABC News reports on an internal memo from late in 1994, offering talking points with which the president could cover himself. The memo:

suggests the president argue that the United States took appropriate and swift action in Rwanda after it was clear there was genocide, and that the U.S. was one of many countries who authorized the United Nations to pull out of the country right before the atrocities began. In short, says the memo, the U.S. ‘did the right thing’ and shares no responsibility for allowing the genocide to occur. Clinton himself echoed these sentiments in comments to the press a few months earlier where he said he had ‘done all he could do’ to help the people of Rwanda.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Clinton’s conduct around Rwanda is that he has been willing to lie about it and twist it in order to paint himself as sincerely oblivious and well-intentioned. The existing evidence incontrovertibly proves that Clinton failed to intervene because he didn’t see anything to be gained domestically. This is not a conspiracy theory, or a speculative hypothesis. Clinton’s own words from the time of the genocide, about the “cumulative weight of American interests,” affirm what witnesses from his Administration have said.

The evidence also proves that the Clinton Administration went far beyond inaction. It also attempted to stop others from acting. But worst of all, it adopted a conscious policy of genocide denial. It knew there was a genocide, but publicly fudged the truth so as not to have to stop it. This is actually far, far worse than even Holocaust denial; after all, the most harmful time to deny a genocide is while it is occurring, especially if your denial made deliberately so that nobody will stop the genocide. At the peak of one of the 20th centuries worst mass slaughters, Bill Clinton presided over an act of institutionalized genocide denial so as to allow the slaughter to continue.

Perhaps, in a just world, Bill Clinton would in prison for conspiracy to deny a genocide. But we live in this world, in which he is likely to return to the White House.

Adapted from the upcoming Current Affairs book “Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America.” Pre-order today for shipping July 1st.